Can anybody point to a good source for GEDCOM help? I've read the tutorials and am still confused!

Question

I am trying to populate MY TREE and am told I have to first perform all of the GEDCOM compares, adds, matches and suggestions.  I have done that to the point where there are no more rows to complete, and STILL nothing populates in my tree other than what I manually put there. What am I doing wrong?  I find the process more complicated than it needs to be.

Comments

Hi John. Welcome to G2G!  Have you tried looking at Mindy Silva's page?

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Space:Current_GEDCOMpare_Process

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I hadn't seen her specific page, so I just read through her process and yup! I've done all of that.  Maybe someone can look at my GEDCOM at GEDCOMpare Sarra Family Tree(2).ged (wikitree.com) and tell me what I haven't done properly?

Answer 1

John, if you have not gotten ADD buttons next to the individuals in your GEDCOMpare report then you have not examined every line. It is easy to miss one and you won't get any ADD buttons until every possible match has been accepted or reject. Still, there is not "automatic population" of all the individuals in your GEDCOM. Once you get the ADD buttons, you will still add each individual one-by-one using the ADD buttons. You should then "clean-up" each profile of it's "GEDCOM junk."

Comments

Nelda, I DO have Add buttons, but they are greyed out. Do I have to de-select the person to activate the Add button and then verify the entry?

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John, you have missed at least one (or more) potential matches so your "ADD" buttons are not yet active. I had the same problem when I uploaded my GEDCOM (when I first joined) and I found it difficult to find that last missed match because of my vision.

Full disclosure...I abandoned adding profiles by GEDCOM because I did not like the resulting "biography" and all the reformatting I had to do. It was okay for prefilling the data fields, but I had to do so much clean-up, I figured I could start from scratch and go just about as quickly. I only add profiles manually now.

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John already has the info but others might find this useful. There is a tool that can help with cleaning up GEDCOM created biographies. It takes care of some of the formatting. You can read more about it in the WikiTree AGC FAQ.